“Thus I passed three
weeks at Nether-Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting the afternoons to a
delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the poet’s friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm trees, and listening
to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our flip. It was
agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down the Bristol Channel, as far as
Linton. We set off together on foot, Coleridge,
John Chester, and I. This
Chester was a native of Nether-Stowey, one of those who were
attracted to Coleridge’s discourse as flies are to honey, or
bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass pan. He ‘followed in the chace, like
a dog who hunts, not like one that made up the cry.’ He had on a brown cloth
coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his walk
like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a sort of trot by the side
of Coleridge, like a running footman by a state coach, that he might
not lose a syllable or sound that fell from Coleridge’s lips. He

TRIP TO LINTON.

63

told me his private opinion, that
Coleridge was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much
less offered an opinion the whole way; yet of the three, had I to choose during that
journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge
into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of
their categories. When he sat down at table with his idol,
John’s felicity was complete. . . .

“We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the brow of
a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay below us: contrasted with
the woody scene around, it looked as clear, as pure, as embrowned and ideal, as any
landscape I have seen since of Gaspar
Poussin’s or Domenichino’s. We had a long day’s march—(our feet kept
time to the echoes of Coleridge’s
tongue)—through Minehead and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Linton, which we did not
reach till near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgment. We
however knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were repaid for our
apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of fried bacon and eggs. The view
in coming along had been splendid. We walked for miles and miles on dark-brown heaths
overlooking the Channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
little sheltered valleys close by the seaside, with a smuggler’s face scowling by
us; and then had to ascend conical hills with a path winding up through a coppice to a
barren top, like a monk’s shaven crown, from one of

64

PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

which I pointed out to
Coleridge’s notice the bare masts of a vessel on the
very edge of the horizon and within the red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own
spectre-ship in the ‘Ancient
Mariner.’ At Linton the character of the sea-coast becomes more marked
and rugged. There is a place called the Valley of Rocks (I
suspect this was only the poetical name for it), bedded among precipices overhanging
the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the seagull
for ever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown
transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork
of perpendicular rocks, something like the Giant’s
Causeway. A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and
Coleridge was running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of
the elements in the Valley of Rocks; but as, if in spite, the
clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops.
Coleridge told me that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a prose tale,
which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior to, the ‘Death of Abel,’ but they had relinquished the
design.

“In the morning of the second day we breakfasted luxuriously in
an old-fashioned parlour, on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very sight of the
beehives from which it had been taken and a garden full of thyme and wild flowers that
had produced it. On this occasion Coleridge
spoke of Virgil’s ‘Georgics,’ but not well. I do not think he had
much feeling for the classical or

WITH COLERIDGE.

65

elegant. It
was in this room that we found a little worn-out copy of the ‘Seasons,’ lying in a window-seat, on which
Coleridge exclaimed, ‘That is
true fame!’ He said Thomson was a
great poet rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were
natural. He spoke of Cowper as the best modern
poet. He said the ‘Lyrical
Ballads’ were an experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would
endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been
attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of
such words as had probably been common in the most ordinary language since the days of
Henry II. Some comparison was introduced between
Shakspeare and Milton. He said ‘he hardly knew which to prefer.
Shakspeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he
was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than
Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man’s
estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.’ He
spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance
of Pope. He did not like the versification of the
latter. He observed that ‘the ears of these couplet-writers might be charged
with having short memories, that could not retain the harmony of whole
passages.’ He thought little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr.
Johnson; and a much higher opinion of Burke, as an orator and politician, than of Fox or Pitt. He however thought
him very inferior in richness of style and imagery to some of our elder prose writers,
par-

66

TOUR WITH COLERIDGE.

ticularly Jeremy Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding;
nor could I get him to enter into the merits of ‘Caleb Williams.’* In short, he was profound
and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he liked, and where he gave his
judgment fair play; capricious, perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and
distastes. We loitered on the ‘ribbed sea-sands,’ in such talk as
this a whole morning, and I recollect met with a curious seaweed, of which John Chester told us the country name! A fisherman
gave Coleridge an account of a boy that had been drowned the day
before, and that they had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. He said
‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, sir, we have a nature towards one another.” This expression,
Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of that
theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove
that likeness was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in the sand put
one in mind of a man’s foot, not because it was part of a former impression of a
man’s foot (for it was quite new), but because it was like the shape of a
man’s foot. He assented to the justness of this distinction (which I

* He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and
at, this time I had as little as he. He somewhere gives a striking account of
the Cartoons at Pisa, by Buffamalco and
others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air, brandishing his
scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while
the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would of
course understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.

RETURN TO STOWEY.

67

have explained at length elsewhere, for the
benefit of the curious), and John Chester listened; not from any
interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should be able to suggest
anything to Coleridge that he did not already know. We returned on
the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent cottage-smoke
curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we had seen the lights gleaming
through the dark.

“In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey we set out, I on my
return home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to preach that day
for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he
had prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of the text,
but should, as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear him—this was a fault—but we met
in the evening at Bridgewater. The next day we had a long day’s walk to Bristol,
and sat down, I recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy
our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some
descriptive lines from his tragedy of ‘Remorse:’—

Oh memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife,

And give those scenes thine everlasting life.

“I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he
had been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was cometary,
meteorous, unlike his setting out.”

quaintance, as he was Lamb’s. The friendship of Lamb
and Coleridge (not reckoning their school-day connexion) dated from
1796; the friendship of my grandfather and Coleridge commenced in
1798. In the case of Lamb the tie was a life-tie, but in my
grandfather’s not so. My grandfather was a politician, and Lamb
was none. Lamb had no feelings or resentments of party; and
Coleridge the Jacobin, and
Coleridge the friend of Quarterly Reviewers, was the same “dearest friend” to him.
But Coleridge’s secession from Liberalism estranged him from my
grandfather, as it also estranged Southey. Perhaps
the bond of union between him and Elia was weakened by the Catholicism
of Elia’s attachments, irrespectively of political opinions. I
suspect strongly that Lamb gained very largely in my
grandfather’s estimation by his letter in the ‘London
Magazine’ to Robert Southey, Esq., but
Lamb was not himself in that letter; he was sorry for it; it was
an outburst of indignation, which quickly subsided; and Southey was at
Lamb’s side, within a few days, as warm a friend as ever.

My grandfather would have liked Lamb
all the better, if he had been a man of stancher mind, a person who had set out with
convictions from which there was to be no swerve. Lamb sinned in my
grandfather’s eyes in having too much good-fellowship, in
shaking everybody round by the hand with a sincerity which a careful study of his
correspondence, in its entire and undiluted state, leaves painfully
questionable.

Yet my grandfather was fond of reverting to these

STILL UPON COLERIDGE.

69

old reminiscences to the very last, of thinking of
Coleridge as he knew and saw him in 1798. In one
of his latest efforts as an essay-writer, he speaks of “his old friend”
Coleridge.

“I remember once saying to Mr. ———, a great
while ago, that I did not seem to have altered any of my ideas since I was sixteen
years old. ‘Why then,’ said he, ‘you are no wiser now than
you were then!

“I might make the same confession, and the same retort would
apply still.

“Coleridge used to tell
me that this pertinacity was owing to a want of sympathy with others. What he calls
sympathising with others is their admiring him; and it must be admitted that he varies
his battery pretty often, in order to accommodate himself to this sort of mutual
understanding.

“But I do not agree in what he says of me. On the other hand, I
think that it is my sympathising beforehand with the different views and feelings that
may be entertained on a subject, that prevents me retracting my judgment, and flinging
myself into the contrary extreme afterwards. . . I cannot say
that, from my own experience, I have found that the persons most remarkable for sudden
and violent changes of principle have been cast in the softest and most susceptible
mould. . . .

“I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge a deserter from the cause
he first espoused, unless one could tell what

70

COLERIDGE’S CHARACTER.

cause he ever heartily espoused, or what party
he ever belonged to in downright earnest. . .

“I have been delighted to hear him expatiate with the most
natural and affecting simplicity on a favourite passage or picture, and all the while
afraid of agreeing with him, lest he should instantly turn round and unsay all that he
had said, for fear of my going away with too good an opinion of my own taste, a too
great an admiration of my idol—and his own.

“I dare not ask his opinion twice, if I have got a favourable
sentence once, lest he should belie his own sentiments to stagger mine. I have heard
him talk divinely (like one inspired) of Boccaccio, and the story of the ‘Pot of
Basil,’ describing ‘how it grew, and it grew, and it
grew,’ till you saw it spread its tender leaves in the light of his eye,
and wave in the tremulous sound of his voice; and yet, if you asked him about it
another time, he would, perhaps, affect to think little of it. or to have forgotten the
circumstance.

“When I cease[d] to hear him quite, other tongues, tuned to what
accents they may [be] of praise or blame, would sound dull, ungrateful, out of tune,
and harsh, in the comparison.”

Coleridge it was who “encouraged him to
write a book, which he did, according to the original bent of his mind (these are my
grandfather’s own words),” and the result, after eight years’
labour, was the ‘Essay on the
Principles of Human Actions,’ which few have read, and fewer have
appreciated. The intellectual profit

RECOLLECTIONS OF 1798.

71

from
this association with Coleridge and Wordsworth was in other ways very considerable.

Of Mr. Hazlitt’s tour in
Wales in 1798, between the time that Coleridge
visited his father at Wem and his own journey to Somersetshire in the same Spring, to see
Coleridge, he has spoken slightly in the account
of his first acquaintance with the poet and philosopher. But what follows will help to cast
a little further light on this tour in the Principality, as well as on that into the west.

“I have certainly spent some enviable hours at inns—sometimes
when I have been left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical
problem; as once at Witham Common, where I found out the proof that likeness is not a
case of the association of ideas—at other times, when there have been pictures in the
room, as at St. Neots (I think it was), where I first met with Gribelin’s engravings of the Cartoons, into
which I entered at once; and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where there
happened to be hanging some of Westall’s
drawings, which I compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn, standing up in
the boat between me and the twilight—at other times I might mention luxuriating in
books, with a peculiar interest in this way, as I remember sitting up half the night to
read ‘Paul and Virginia,’
which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the rain all day;
and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame
D’Arblay’s ‘Camilla.’

72

RECOLLECTIONS OF 1798.

It was on the 10th of April, 1798, that I sat down to
a volume of the ‘New
Héloise,’ at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold
chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St.
Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the
heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as a bonne bouchée to crown the evening with. It was my
birthday, and I had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit
this delightful spot. . . . How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road that
overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have just quoted from
Mr. Coleridge’s poems. . . . I would
return some time or other to this enchanted spot, but I would return to it alone. What
other self could I find to share that influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the
fragments of which I could hardly conjure up to myself. . . . . . . . . . . I could
stand on some tall rock and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what
I then was. I was at that time going shortly to visit the poet I have above named.

“The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to
come, or in fancying what may have happened, in real or fictitious story, to others. I
have had more pleasure in reading the adventures of a novel (and perhaps changing
situations with the hero) than I ever had in my own. I do not think any one can feel
much happier—a greater degree of heart’s ease—than I used to feel in reading
‘Tristram Shandy,’
and ‘Peregrine
Pickle,’ and ‘Tom
Jones,’ and the ‘Tatler,’ and

The story of Federigo Alberigi affected me as
if it had been my own case; and I saw his hawk upon her perch, in the clear, cold air,
and ‘how fat and fair a bird she was,’ as plain as ever I saw a
picture of Titian’s; and felt that I should
have served her up, as he did, as a banquet for his mistress, who came to visit him at
his own poor farm. . . . Mrs. Inchbald was
always a great favourite with me. There is the true soul of woman breathing from what
she writes, as much as if you heard her voice. It is as if Venus had written books. I first read her ‘Simple Story’ (of all places in the world) at
Mr. ——’s. No matter where it was, for it transported me
out of myself. I recollect walking out to escape from one of the tenderest parts, in
order to return to it again with double relish. An old crazy hand-organ was playing
‘Robin Adair,’ a summer shower dropped manna
on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of happiness. Her heroine, Miss Milner, was at my side. My dream has since been
verified—how like it was to the reality! . . . I once sat on a sunny bank in a field,
in which the green blades of corn waved in the fitful northern breeze, and read the
letter in the ‘New
Héloise’ in which St. Preux describes the Pays de
Vaud. I never felt what Shakspeare calls
‘my glassy essence’ so much as then. My thoughts were pure and
free. . . . I wished I could

74

THE NEW HELOISE.

have written such
a letter. . . . Of all the pictures, prints, or drawings I ever saw, none ever gave me
such satisfaction as the rude etchings at the top of Rousseau’s ‘Confessions.’ . . . It is not even said
anywhere that such is the case, but I had got it in my head that the rude sketches of
old-fashioned houses, stone walls, and stumps of trees, represented the scenes at
Annecy and Vevay, where he who relished all more sharply than others, and by his own
intense aspirations after good, had nearly delivered mankind from the yoke of evil,
first drew the breath of hope.

“The last time I tasted the luxury of an inn in its full
perfection was one day after a sultry day’s walk in summer between Farnham and
Alton. I was fairly tired out; I walked into an inn-yard (I think at the latter place);
I was shown by the waiter to what looked at first like common outhouses at the other
end of it, but they turned out to be a suite of rooms, probably a hundred years old.
The one I entered opened into an old-fashioned garden, embellished with beds of
larkspur and a leaden Mercury; it was wainscoted, and there was a grave-looking,
dark-coloured portrait of Charles II. hanging up on
the tiled chimney-piece. I had ‘Love
for Love’ in my pocket, and began to read. Coffee was brought in in a
silver coffee-pot; the cream, the bread and butter, everything was excellent, and the
flavour of Congreve’s style prevailed over
all.

“I prolonged the entertainment till a late hour, and relished
this divine comedy better even than when I used to see it played by Miss Mellon as Miss Prue; Bob

THE REV. JOSEPH FAWCETT.

75

Palmer as Tattle; and Bannister as honest Ben. This circumstance happened just five years ago, and it seems
like yesterday. If I count my life so by lustres, it will soon glide away; yet I shall
not have to repine, if, while it lasts, it is enriched with a few such
recollections!”

But my grandfather was not long before he found another congenial and
improving mind. During a visit to Hertfordshire, under I know not what circumstances, he
made the acquaintance of a gentleman, on whose friendship he looked back through life with
pleasure and pride. I shall leave him, as usual, to speak for himself:—

“The person of the most refined and least contracted taste I
ever knew was the late Joseph Fawcett, the
friend of my youth. He was almost the first literary acquaintance I ever made, and I
think the most candid and unsophisticated. He had a masterly perception of all styles
and of every kind and degree of excellence, sublime or beautiful, from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost” to Shenstone’s ‘Pastoral Ballad;’ from Butler’s ‘Analogy’ down to ‘Humphrey Clinker.’ If you had a favourite
author, he had read him too, and knew all the best morsels, the subtle traits, the capital touches. ‘Do you like Sterne?’—‘Yes, to be
sure,’ he would say, ‘I should deserve to be hanged if I
didn’t.’ His repeating some parts of ‘Comus,’ with his fine, deep, mellow-toned
voice, particularly the lines,

I have heard my mother Circe with the
Sirens three, &c.,

and the enthusiastic comments he made afterwards, were

76

THE REV. JOSEPH FAWCETT.

a feast to the ear and to the soul. He read the
poetry of Milton with the same fervour and
spirit of devotion that I have since heard others read their own. ‘That is the
most delicious feeling of all,’ I have heard him exclaim, ‘to
like what is excellent, no matter whose it is.’ In this respect he
practised what he preached. He was incapable of harbouring a sinister motive, and
judged only from what he felt. There was no flaw or mist in the clear mirror of his
mind. He was open to impressions as he was strenuous in maintaining them. He did not
care a rush whether a writer was old or new, in prose or in verse. ‘What he
wanted,’ he said, ‘was something to make him
think.’

“Most men’s minds are to me like musical instruments out
of tune. Touch a particular key, and it jars and makes harsh discord with your own.
They like ‘Gil Blas,’ but
can see nothing to laugh at in ‘Don
Quixote;’ they adore Richardson, but are disgusted with Fielding.

“Fawcett had a taste
accommodated to all these. He was not exceptions. He gave a cordial welcome to all
sorts, provided they were the best in their kind. He was not fond of counterfeits or
duplicates. His own style was laboured and artificial to a fault, while his character
was frank and ingenuous in the extreme. He was not the only individual whom I have
known to counteract their natural disposition in coming before the public; and in
avoiding what they perhaps thought an inherent infirmity, debar themselves of their
real strength and advantages.

THE REV. JOSEPH FAWCETT.

77

“A heartier friend or honester critic I never coped withal. He
has made me feel (by contrast) the want of genuine sincerity and generous sentiment in
some that I have listened to since. . . . I would rather be a man of disinterested
taste and liberal feeling, to see and acknowledge truth and beauty wherever I found it,
than a man of greater and more original genius, to hate, envy, and deny all excellence
but my own—but that poor scanty pittance of it (compared with the whole) which I had
myself produced.

“It was he who delivered the Sunday evening lectures at the Old
Jewry, which were so popular about twenty years ago. He afterwards retired to
Hedgegrove, in Hertfordshire.

“It was here that I first became acquainted with him, and passed
some of the pleasantest days of my life. He was the first person of literary eminence
whom I had then known; and the conversations I had with him on subjects of taste and
philosophy (for his taste was as refined as his powers of reasoning were profound and
subtle) gave me a delight such as I can never feel again.

“Of all the persons I have ever known, he was the most perfectly
free from every taint of jealousy or narrowness. Never did a mean or sinister motive
come near his heart. He was one of the most enthusiastic admirers of the French
Revolution; and I believe that

78

THE REV. JOSEPH FAWCETT.

the
disappointment of the hopes he had cherished of the freedom and happiness of mankind
preyed upon his mind, and hastened his death.

“Fawcett used to say that
if Sir Isaac Newton himself had lisped, he could
not have thought anything of him. Coleridge, I
recollect, once asked me whether I thought that the different members of a family
really liked one another so well, or had so much attachment as was generally supposed;
and I said that I conceived the regard they had towards each other was expressed by the
word interest, rather than by any other; which he said was the
true answer.”

Mr. Fawcett was a friend of Godwin’s. My grandfather says:—“Mr.
Fawcett (an old friend and fellow-student of our author, and who always
spoke of his writings with admiration tinctured with wonder) used to mention a circumstance
with respect to his ‘Life of
Chatham,’ which may throw some light on the history and progress of
Mr. Godwin’s mind.

“He was anxious to make his biographical account as complete as
he could, and applied for this purpose to many of his acquaintance to furnish him with
anecdotes or to suggest criticisms. Amongst others, Mr.
Fawcett repeated to him what he thought a striking passage on general
warrants, delivered by Lord Chatham, at which he
(Mr. Fawcett) had been present. ‘Every man’s
house’ (said this emphatic thinker and speaker) ‘has been called
his castle. And why is it called his castle? Is it because it is defended by a
wall, because it is sur-

MR. HAZLITT’S EARLY READING.

79

rounded by a moat. No; it may be nothing more than a straw-built shed. It may be
open to all the elements, the wind may enter in, the rain may enter in, but the
king cannot enter in.’ His friend thought that the point here was
palpable enough; but when he came to read the printed volumes he found it thus
transposed. ‘Every man’s house is his castle. And why is it called so?
Is it because it is defended by a wall, because it is surrounded with a moat? No,
it may be nothing more than a straw-built shed. It may be exposed to all the
elements, the rain may enter into it, all the winds of heaven may
whistle round it, but the king cannot, &c.’ This was what
Fawcett called a defect of natural
imagination.”

I have thus gathered into one point of view the notices of Mr. Fawcett scattered through his friend’s works,
from a desire that the public should know a little more than they do of a man who stood so
high in Mr. Hazlitt’s opinion, and who seems
to have fully deserved the place which he held there. There was a report current after
Mr. Fawcett’s death that Mr. Hazlitt
intended to draw up his life; but whether true or no, the design was never carried out.

He was a spare reader, and the narrowness of his attainments in this
branch of study told against him beyond question. But he had no inclination for the general
run of authors, ancient or modern, and he wanted no better or stronger reason for steering
clear of them. A little later on he made the acquaintance of the ‘Seasons’ and the ‘Castle of Indolence,’ and still later, of the
‘Waverley Novels.’
He once paid five shillings at a library for the loan of ‘Woodstock.’

“I knew Tom
Jones by heart, and was deep in Peregrine Pickle. I was intimately acquainted
with all the heroes and heroines of Richardson’s romances, and could turn from one to the other as I
pleased. I could con over that single passage in ‘Pamela’ about her ‘lumpish
heart,’ and never have done admiring the skill of the author and the
truth of nature.

“For my part I have doubts of his (Tom
Jones) being so very handsome, from the author’s always talking
about his beauty; and I suspect that he was a clown, from being constantly assured that
he was so very genteel.

“I am no friend to repeating-watches. The only pleasant
association I have with them is the account given by Rousseau of one French lady, who sat up reading the ‘New Héloise,’ when it first came
out—and ordering her maid to sound the repeater, found it was too late to go to bed,
and continued reading on till morning. . . . . . In general, I have heard repeating

EARLY READING.

81

watches sounded in stage-coaches at night, when
some fellow-traveller, suddenly awaking and wondering what was the hour, another has
very deliberately taken out his watch, and pressing the spring, it has counted out the
time.

John Bannister (1760-1836)
English comic actor whose roles included Tony Lumpkin, Sir Fretful Plagiary, and Sir
Anthony Absolute. He was a favorite of Charles Lamb.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
English poet and essayist, the sister of John Aikin, who married Rochemont Barbauld in
1774 and taught at Palgrave School, a dissenting academy (1774-85).

Buonamico Buffalmacco (1820 fl.)
Florentine painter who was the subject of one of Vasari's biographies; his work no longer
survives.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Irish politician and opposition leader in Parliament, author of On the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790).

Frances D'Arblay [née Burney] (1752-1840)
English novelist, the daughter of the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney; author of Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World
(1778), Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), and Camilla (1796).

Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham (1692-1752)
English physico-theologian; he was author of the Analogy of
Religion (1736); he was dean of St. Paul's (1740) and bishop of Durham
(1750).

John Chester (1764-1842)
Of Nether-Stowey and Chapel Terrace, Redruth; he was a farmer who traveled to Germany
with Coleridge and Wordsworth; he was afterwards a purser for the Tincroft Mine.

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682)
French painter whose idealized landscapes were much admired in Britain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of Biographia Literaria (1817), On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.

William Congreve (1670-1729)
English comic dramatist; author of, among others, The Double
Dealer (1694), Love for Love (1695), and The Way of the World (1700).

William Cowper (1731-1800)
English poet, author of Olney Hymns (1779), John
Gilpin (1782), and The Task (1785); Cowper's delicate
mental health attracted as much sympathy from romantic readers as his letters, edited by
William Hayley, did admiration.

George Farquhar (1677-1707)
Irish playwright, author of two repertory plays, The Recruiting
Officer (1706) and The Beaux Stratagem (1707).

Joseph Fawcett (1758 c.-1804)
Presbyterian preacher at the Old Jewry meeting-house in London (1785-95) before taking up
farming and succumbing to drink; he wrote poetry and was a radical friend of Godwin and
Hazlitt.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
English dramatist, essayist, and novelist; author of Joseph
Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones (1749).

Charles James Fox (1749-1806)
Whig statesman and the leader of the Whig opposition in Parliament after his falling-out
with Edmund Burke.

William Godwin (1756-1836)
English novelist and political philosopher; author of An Inquiry
concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793) and Caleb
Williams (1794); in 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)
German poet, playwright, and novelist; author of The Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774) and Faust (1808, 1832).

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
English poet, author of “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Elegy written in a
Country Churchyard,” and “The Bard”; he was professor of history at Cambridge
(1768).

Simon Gribelin (1661 c.-1733)
French engraver who did illustrations for Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and The Spirit of the Age (1825).

Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813), History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Clergyman and novelist; author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy (1768).

James Thomson (1700-1748)
Anglo-Scottish poet and playwright; while his descriptive poem, The
Seasons (1726-30), was perhaps the most popular poem of the eighteenth century,
the poets tended to admire more his Spenserian burlesque, The Castle of
Indolence (1748).

Joshua Toulmin (1740-1815)
Educated at St Paul's School, he was minister at Mary Street General Baptist Chapel,
Taunton; he became an influential Unitarian who contributed largely to the Monthly Repository.

Richard Westall (1765-1836)
English poet and illustrator who favored literary subjects and published a collection of
verse, A Day in Spring and other Poems (1808).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.

The London Magazine. (1820-1829). Founded by John Scott as a monthly rival to Blackwood's, the
London Magazine included among its contributors Charles Lamb, John Clare, Allan Cunningham,
Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Hood.

The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the Quarterly was instigated by Walter
Scott as a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. It was edited by
William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.

The Tatler. (1709-11). A thrice weekly periodical conducted by Sir Richard Steele that established the format
for periodical essays used throughout the eighteenth century.

The Arabian Nights. (1705-08 English trans.). Also known as The Thousand and One Nights. Antoine Galland's
French translation was published 1704-17, from which the original English versions were
taken.